Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (12 page)

Jinx stepped between us, shaking his head. ‘This is getting us nowhere,’ he said again.

‘The hell it isn’t getting us somewhere,’ she said, moving around him. ‘It’s getting us to the morgue – and fast, too.’

‘Who’s scared now? Who’s pants are wet now?’ I said. ‘And you want to do the thinking for us! As emotionally unstable as you are, you want to do the thinking for us! Up and down, up and down, immitigable movements of fear and panic – why, all we got to do to get ourselves into the morgue is to turn the thinking over to you …’

‘My thinking was all right when it came to getting you off that stinking prison farm,’ she said, flaring a little.

‘You didn’t want me in the first place,’ I said. ‘You wanted your brother. You got him killed. Fine thinking.’

She moved within arm-length of me. Her eyes were flashing and her face was full of storm.

‘Now, lissen …’ Jinx said, putting his hand on her arm.

She yanked her shoulder violently, freeing herself of his hand. ‘You lissen,’ she said. ‘This son-of-a-bitch is crazy. Him and his superior intellect. Him and his Phi Beta Kappa key. Him and his goddamn university degree. They may give him the right to look down his nose at us, but it goddamn sure don’t give him the right to risk our lives with his maniac ideas. If we stand for ’em. goddamn it, we
ought
to be killed …’

‘Maniac ideas?’ I said. ‘What’re you talking about? The recording?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about…’

‘There’s nothing maniacal about that. Is there anything maniacal about that?’ I asked Jinx.

‘I put in eighteen hundred dollars, didn’t I?’

‘There’s nothing maniacal about it,’ I said to Holiday. ‘It’s not even original. It’s not even clever. And it doesn’t even approach brilliance. You don’t shade your words properly. First, it would have to be original and then clever and then brilliant and then, maybe, it would approach an outer degree of mania. This has not
one
of those facets. It’s really cheap and conventional and melodramatic…’

‘You and your goddamn fake modesty,’ she said. ‘Who the hell do you think you’re kidding?’

‘You don’t really believe that I’m proud of this, do you?’ I asked.

‘Crap,’ she said.

‘I’m not only
not
proud of it,’ I said slowly, trying to keep the rage out of my voice, ‘I’m ashamed of it. It’s not the kind of a
coup
– and I may dignify it with such a classical term – that pleases me. To gratify my colossal ego a triumph must deliver rich rounded satisfactory nuances that contain intellectual as well as physical components. This merely was a matter of expediency; a piddling little material victory. I feel truly degraded having had anything at all to do with it. But it was too easy and convenient to pass up.’

‘…. Just a lot of big words that don’t take any of the dynamite out of it,’ she said. ‘This might work on a rookie cop, but you’re fooling around with an Inspector.’

‘Inspector, Chief, Mayor – what the hell is the difference? All these guys have their price. With Cobbett it was his semi-annual heat, with others it’s money. We don’t have enough money yet – so we have to have a substitute. This is it. How the hell do you think bums like Karpis and Floyd and Dillinger got to the top? With brains?’

I wished I’d never had her. I wished I’d kept the whole thing on a professional basis. I wished I’d never glimpsed the Seven Cities of Cibola, Eldorado, Jagersfontein. Then I could tell her to pull out and go back to Chicago where the cops were waiting for her. Or even better, I could pull out myself. If I hadn’t… But I had. ‘Jesus Christ!’ I said. ‘Can’t you get it through your head that because the guy is an Inspector is the only reason the idea was ever any good? What would it get us to nail a rookie cop? How can you blackmail a guy who’s got nothing to lose? Don’t you see – it had to be an executive, an Inspector or something.’

‘Can’t you get it through your head that that’s also what makes it so risky?’

‘How, for Christ’s sake?’

‘You made the record to play for him, didn’t you? He’s got to hear it, hasn’t he?’

‘Certainly.’

‘What do you think he’ll do then?’

‘He’ll follow orders.’

‘What’s to prevent him from killing us and taking the record? He’s an Inspector. He can get away with it.’

I stared at her in surprise. Is this always to be my fate? I wondered. ‘You tell her,’ I said to Jinx. ‘Jesus, you tell her…’

‘The record he’ll hear’ll be a copy,’ Jinx explained. ‘We’re making a couple of copies.’

‘I thought you understood that was the only way it’d work,’ I said. ‘Whaddya think we got the phonograph for? To play Bach fugues? We’re gonna take the record you heard and put it on the phonograph and start playing it and then put the microphone up close and record it over and then we’ll do that once more …’

‘Now, now,’ Jinx said. ‘Don’t rub it in.’

‘She ought to’ve known it,’ I said. ‘My God, this is an advanced class. This is not kindergarten.’

Holiday looked at me and her eyes were venomous. Then she very slowly and very deliberately laid her cigarette on the ball of her right thumb and triggered the index finger against it, raising her hand level with my face, tendons tensed, ready to flip it. I didn’t budge a muscle, just stared at her. You turn that cigarette loose, I was thinking, and I’ll kill you, by God, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you by inches, El Dorado and all, Jagersfontein and all, Koh-i-Noor and all…

‘Make some coffee, Holiday,’ Jinx said quietly.

She hesitated for a moment, and put the cigarette in her mouth and walked out.

‘Hadn’t we better get going making the copies?’ Jinx asked me.

‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘
Jesus
!’

Jinx went into the closet and lifted the recording set off the chair and brought it in the bedroom and put it on the bureau.

‘You oughtn’t rub it into her so hard,’ he said.

‘She oughtn’t be so dumb,’ I said.

He picked up the phonograph and took it into the closet and put it on the chair and came out again.

‘All of us can’t have Phi Beta Kappa keys,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t thinking of you,’ I said. ‘Don’t get me wrong.’

‘
I’m
thinking of me,’ he said. ‘Could I ask a question without being dumb?’

‘Don’t be silly now, Jinx …’

‘Why’d you tell Webber you didn’t know when you could get in touch with me?’

‘I got to have time to get copies of that record to the right people, that’s why. When that son-of-a-bitch hears it and I tell him that certain right people have a copy of it – just in case he tries anything funny with me – I don’t want to be bluffing. I damn sure want to mean it. And he’s got to know I mean it, too.’

‘How do you know who the right people are?’

‘That’s why I stalled him. I got to find out. I figured you could help. You know this town. You ought to know somebody. Don’t you know any lawyers? That’s what we need, a lawyer. A damn good lawyer.’

‘I don’t know any. Mason might.’

‘Well, we can’t ask him, that’s a cinch. Didn’t you tell me that you once drove Baby-Face Nelson somewhere to get his eye sewed up?’

‘That wasn’t to a lawyer’s. That was to a doctor’s. Doc Green. He’s no lawyer.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘The other side of town.’

‘What’s the address.’

‘I don’t know the address.’

‘Do you remember the house?’

‘I think so. Why?’

‘We’re going out there.’

‘He’s no lawyer. He’s a doctor.’

‘I got an idea, though,’ I said.

His face darkened and he lifted it a little, wrinkling his nose. He didn’t sniff, but he was ready to.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘Have I got to worry about you getting panicky now?’

‘Doc Green’ll cross you up in a minute,’ he said. ‘Anybody he knows’ll cross you up in a minute. He’s bug-house.’

‘He didn’t cross Baby-Face Nelson. He wasn’t too bug-house for him. Baby-Face trusted him.’

‘That was different.’

‘How was it different?’

‘Well…’

‘Don’t hedge, goddamn it, say it. He was afraid to cross Baby-Face, is that what you mean? Baby-Face was a big shot, is that what you mean?’

‘I mean Baby-Face had a lot of dough,’ he said, hedging. ‘That’s what I mean. He had a lot of dough.’

‘Well, one of these days we’ll have a lot of dough, too,’ I said.

‘I don’t wanna argue with you, but I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said flatly. ‘Doc Green’s bug-house. He’s a nut. I wouldn’t trust him and I wouldn’t trust anybody he knows. And I’m not gonna let you trust him, either.’

‘Please, Jinx,’ I said. ‘My intelligence has been insulted enough for one day. Do you think I’m so stupid I’d try to play this hand without an ace in the hole? I’m not going to trust Doc Green too far. There’s only one human being that I really trust, the only honest man on the face of the earth: my brother. I’m sending him a record to New York – not to be opened till I say so. That’s all the insurance I need. Meantime, we got to have somebody here in with us, somebody who knows the score in this town, bug-house or not.’

‘Does your honest brother know what you’re doing?’

‘I took care of that a long time ago. Ralph Cotter’s not my real name.’

‘What is your real name?’

I laughed. ‘You’d drop dead if you knew,’ I said.

T
HERE WERE LIGHT STANDARDS
along both sides of the street, but there were no lights burning, and in the lumpy glow of a moon becoming gibbous all the little houses in the block, chequered with windows that were squares and rectangles of yellowish incandescence, stood with amiable correctness, built to toy-town scale, and with scaled-up toy automobiles parked along the street. The house we were looking for was in the middle of the block, one-story, a cottage. We had no trouble finding it; we couldn’t have missed it. The two front rooms on either side of the door were lighted, but with the windows shaded, and on the nice lawn near the pavement was a wooden sign, flooded with bright light from a goose-neck fixture.

DR DARIUS GREEN

PHILOSOPHIC GUIDE

ORGANON

(Aristotle)

NOVUM ORGANUM

(Bacon)

TERTIUM ORGANUM

(Ouspensky)

THE KEY TO COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

THE SPATIAL UNDERSTANDING OF TIME

DO NOT BE LOST IN THE LABYRINTH OF CONFUSED THOUGHT

 ‘I told you he was bug-house, didn’t I?’ Jinx said.

‘Are you sure this is the right place?’

‘Sure, I’m sure. This is the place. That’s his name right there. Doc Green. But that sign wasn’t there last time. That’s something new.…’

We walked on up the curving brick pathway to the steps and on to the porch. It was not until then that we saw through the discreetly angled slats of a very long Venetian blind a room filled with people. They were men and women, further than that a nondescript group, sitting in chairs with their backs towards us, and now I heard the droning of a voice speaking words that were also nondescript.

Jinx looked at me. ‘This joint’s full of people,’ he said in a whisper.

‘Nothing wrong with that,’ I said.

‘I don’t like it.…’

‘We got no choice,’ I said. ‘We got to see the guy. Come on.…’

‘Why can’t we hang around out here till they break up?’

‘Why can’t we hang around in there till they break up? You think these people’ll pay any attention to us? All we got to do is open the door and go in,’ I said, pointing to another sign, much smaller, that was painted on a side panel in the front door. PLEASE DO NOT USE BELL DURING LECTURES. OPEN THE DOOR AND ENTER. YOU ARE WELCOME. ‘Come on,’ I said.

I moved to the door and opened it and we went in. We were in a boxlike entry hall that was completely bare of decorations or furnishings, and there was a second door, an inner, swinging door, just ahead on the panel of which was painted in the same-styled professional lettering: ENTER QUIETLY, PLEASE. The voice that had been a drone on the outside now became sporadically human as certain unobese words, slender enough to come through the crack of the door, could be heard: Truth … is not the…  our … an … with … the …’ I pushed this door open, a little surprised with the ease and noiselessness with which it swung, stepping inside, holding it until Jinx was also inside, and then I closed it so carefully that it squeezed my finger against the facing, not enough to hurt, just enough to make me know it had been caught. There were twenty-five or thirty persons sitting in a living-room that contained only them and the chairs, and in the dining-room which adjoined, against a table, stood a slender old man who could only have been Doc Green. He had a gaunt face in the Lincoln mould and wore a black string tie and a linen coat, and was reading with some briskness from a paper in his hand.

‘… consciousness, therefore, is the sole basis of certainty. The Mind is its own witness. Reason sees in itself that which is above itself and its source: and again, that which is below itself as itself once more. There is a raying out of all orders of existence, an external emanation from …’

I felt a touch at my elbow and I turned and there stood a girl, the most attractive girl I had ever seen in my life, the girl of a million dreams, beckoning for us to follow, her lips pursed, patting them with a rigid forefinger, warning us not to make a sound. The words the old man had been speaking were now just a sound, a hum and I heard nothing intelligible. The girl led us into the room where the others were sitting and indicated several empty chairs in the last row, near the Venetian blind. She pressed herself against the wall to let us pass, the way you do when the passage is narrow, and she and I were suddenly face to face, body to body, but touching only lightly, and I caught a fragment of her perfume, a fragment of a fragment of a fragment that I remembered from somewhere and then I saw that she wore no make-up and that her face seemed unbelievably white for the lack of it, and that her hair was black, a livid black, my God, you never saw hair so black, and then I realized it was not so much the lack of make-up which made her face white as it was the mighty compulsion of that black hair. For a moment we stood there looking at each other, body to body, for only the echo of a moment, but long enough to fill my world with a white face and black hair, oh, yes, quite long enough. Then she moved on and I went back and sat down with Jinx and when I looked around again she had gone. She had disappeared on the left, by the swinging door, but I could not see because of the jutting wall. She must have been a sort of usher, and I kept wondering who she was and trying to remember where I had smelled that perfume before, or what the perfume reminded me of; asking myself who she was and what she had to do with all this, but watching all the time to see if she would come back.